Spend Matters is nearly eight years old (UK/Europe is one and a half) - and we're about to change in quite a serious way. In the next few weeks, we'll be unveiling a premium content and membership service (on both sides of the Atlantic) that will shake things up in this sector. We hope to be somewhat - OK, very - disruptive. This new offering is targeted toward practitioners and providers, albeit with slightly different value propositions for each. We see an important void in the market right now that's been left open by traditional industry analysts, publishing/media houses and speciality research firms. It's one we intend to fill with something entirely new built on true expertise and opinion, but delivered in a way the market has not seen before.

With our new subscription services, our plan is to help procurement and supply chain professionals to be more effective in their jobs, particularly by providing relevant information, original thought leadership, opinion and analysis connected with technology, tools, solutions, market developments and latest thinking in our field. When it comes to coverage, we will span the invaluable to the esoteric to the controversial in order to provide our readers with an information advantage to drive everything from polite hallway conversation to truly strategic decision-making.

Our goal on the provider side is to be no less invaluable. Our new content offering will assist providers with a focus on procurement and supply chain to understand their customers better, explore the competitive landscape, develop their offering, market effectively, identify and understand potential partners and generate revenue. Our aim is to provide insight that is so foundational that affiliating with and staying on top of Spend Matters becomes as routine as making coffee (tea - UK; espresso - Italy; reindeer milk - Finland) ) every morning.

We will also maintain a smaller (and dedicated) focus on helping the investment community (sell-side, buy-side, private equity and venture firms) understand the real customer, growth and solution drivers behind public and private companies in the markets we cover (as well as broader sector opportunities for growth).

If you're a current Spend Matters reader and are afraid of change, don't worry. We will still be providing each month and free to everyone some 150 new website articles, representing over 60,000 words (wow) of insight, analysis and opinion, on Spend Matters and Spend Matters UK/Europe (if you add in MetalMiner and HC Matters, that number triples). However, we hope to prove the invaluable worth of our new service at price points which make it an absolutely no-brainer to become a subscribing member.

Stay tuned as we share more details in the coming days -- and launch our premium service in beta in a matter of weeks if all goes as planned (probably both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously).

I think our thought leadership paradigm is a holistic future-state vision of a collaborative partnering social enterprise, with a customer-focused social media savvy and right-sourced infrastructure… (head explodes…)

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Procurement Research

Spend Matters research is based on a year-long editorial calendar, exploring bigger picture areas and issues.

New! Geo-political Risk - An Informed Global View Is Essential The fifth of our short papers outlining key supply chain risk areas looks at geo-political risks, which include war and revolution as well as labour disputes and the like. Clearly, this sort of risk event can be amongst the most serious in terms of implications for buyers.

New! "Man-Made" Risk - Different Risks Require Thoughtful StrategiesThis is the fourth of our short papers outlining key supply chain risk areas. This examines "man-made" risks, a broad category that ranges from fires and explosions to strikes and labour disputes. All can have a serious impact for customers of the firms affected, so effective risk management is vital.

New! Natural Disasters – How to Mitigate Unavoidable RisksThis is the third in a series of short papers outlining the supply chain risks that can have the most devastating effects on your business. This paper examines the risk to suppliers (and ultimately the buyer) of a natural disaster - a risk type that is mostly unavoidable but one against which you can mitigate.

New! Supply Chain Risk – Getting To Grips With n-Tier VisibilityIn this briefing paper, we look at supply chain risk, and in particular the risks that emerge from beyond the first-tier (the direct suppliers to our organisation). We include ideas on how to gain greater visibility of the whole supply chain or network, and what to do once we have it.

New! The Merger – A Procurement StoryA short novel in four chapters. It follows and scripts the daily lives of two CPOs whose businesses have been recently merged: the one, a fully tech-savvy, source-to-pay function, the other, relying on personal expertise and hands-on manual processes. We learn of their opposing challenges and how they resolve them -- together.

Improve Your Procurement Negotiation SkillsThe work of behavioural psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Dr Daniel Kahneman suggests some winning techniques. How to use priming, attitudes to risk and anchoring to your advantage in negotiations!

Full Value Buying: Moving Beyond Price NegotiationWe look at range of procurement mechanisms that can drive better value, and then consider two aspects in more detail - demand management and specification - which can drive far greater benefits than a pure price focus!